A Q&A WITH FORBES’ LEWIS DVORKIN

trenches Tales from the digital media

A Q&A WITH FORBES’ LEWIS DVORKIN

By Cynthia Joyce s Forbes’ chief product officer delivered his keynote address during the 2015 Ole Miss

New Media Conference in early April, four words in particular seemed to hang in the air over the eager Overby Center audience:

“Journalists don’t own journalism.”

As if the point required underscoring, on the screen behind Lewis DVorkin appeared a close-up photo of an 800-pound gorilla labeled “Facebook.” (The social media behemoth was getting ready to roll out its controversial “instant articles” feature, allowing publishers to publish content directly to the Facebook platform rather than linking back to their own sites.)

A longtime journalism industry veteran and digital media entrepreneur who held top positions at The New York Times, Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, and AOL before becoming founder and CEO of the content news network True/Slant — whose contributor-enabled publishing platform also provided the foundation for Forbes’ successful BrandVoice, DVorkin is well acquainted with the pain points of industry disruption.

But his candid warning also was meant as a rallying cry — a gauntlet thrown down for the next generation of journalists to pick up.

“I truly believe there’s no better time to be a journalist,” DVorkin said. “You can reach a bigger audience than ever. You don’t need an editor to hire you — you can do what you want. And you have the tools to do it.”

But, he urged, journalists have to use those tools to innovate, not just to replicate what’s been done before. “Better sameness is not going to do the trick.”

DVorkin took some time after the conference to talk about his own career path, the ever-evolving demands of digital media, and why “Broadcast News” was so much better than “The Newsroom.” ***

Your statement that “journalists don’t own journalism” is irrefutable, and yet it still comes as a shock. Do you think it’s a failure of leadership that has kept traditional journalists in the dark for so long about the business side of publishing?

Yes. Journalists were taught that that would make them less pure.

You’ve written disparagingly in the past about the unrealistic portrayals of “priestly” journalists in the HBO series “The Newsroom,” suggesting Forbes is “taking the halo off of journalists” with its native advertising model.

My favorite line ever is in “Broadcast News,” when Holly Hunter tells William Hurt that he crossed the line, and he said, “They keep moving that little sucker, don’t they?” That is the world we live in today. And that’s the great challenge — moving with the line, but staying on the right side of the line. You can debate the right side, but you’ve got to move with it. There has been resistance. Less today, but certainly five or 10 years ago, the resistance from the journalists who didn’t move with the line was intense.

You’ve been the punching bag of a lot of those journalists. How does that feel?

I don’t care. It doesn’t bother me. I truly don’t care.

Was that always true, or have you had to thicken your skin over time?

I don’t think that was always true. But I’ll tell you why it is now: I have a healthy respect for the business, and I have a healthy disrespect for the business. There’s nothing perfect about what we do. This is not science, for God’s sake. This is not brain surgery. If you’re having brain surgery, you want the best surgeon you can get, right? Well, you know, journalism doesn’t require the best surgeon. It’s just not the same. That’s not belittling it, but we sometimes put ourselves on these pedestals. We own the truth? Give me a break. And, oh, by the way — who are we to appoint ourselves the guardians of the universe?

You made the point that native advertising isn’t new. Will there ever come a point where we stop talking about “pure journalism” as though it ever truly existed?

No. I think journalism is an evolutionary kind of thing, and I think every generation of it will inform the other.

Although I do have to say, there are a few things I lament about what’s happening right now. There is not a lot of time for newsroom training or newsroom apprenticeship … there are no longer apprenticeships where you have mentors for three or four years, like I did. I lament that.

But on the flip side of that coin, the new journalist or young person doesn’t have the patience to wait that long to be mentored — it’s always “How do I get on to the next thing, and the next, and the next?” I went through three or four years of basically ripping pages off a wire machine without anyone ever noticing. They’re not going to stand for that. I think that takes away from the honing of some fundamentals. And there is a lot lost there. But we live in a different world — it’s tradeoffs.

One of the major frustrations of working on the web has always been that one often winds up working in service of the tools, instead of the other way around. Do you feel like you’ve built the tools you want at Forbes?

It’s a constant process. We’ve built some really great tools, and we’ve built some tools that we thought would be great but really aren’t that great.

I have an expression — and it’s funny you bring it up — I learned this from AOL. My expression is, “The tools will set you free.” If you don’t have the right tools, you will never have the freedom to do your best work. So we are really trying to build great publishing tools, but it’s hard.

The faster people are consuming things, the faster we need to publish. And as the web is becoming more visual, it’s requiring publishers and content creators to be more visual, so the tools that make that easy and fast get even more difficult to build.

What is really a great challenge facing the publishing business today is what I call legacy platforms. Legacy platforms once became “legacy” after 10 years. Then they became “legacy” after only five. I can tell you all of the publishers in the world who have gone downhill because the publishing tools are so intricate that they became too difficult to change. You just go downhill.

We do our best at Forbes to be cognizant of that, not get caught in that, which this is why I pay attention to Medium and all these places, because they’re the new publishing platforms. Content creators — they’re going to go where it’s easiest to do it. And right now [Forbes’ platform] is pretty easy. You can make some money. But I am sure the Tumblers and Mediums are easier yet. So we try to keep pace with that.

Does anybody edit your blog?

I try to live the life of what I ask people to do — I write on my own, I put my photos in, I put my graphics in, and I hit the publish button. I live the life. If I have a complicated thing, I’ll go ask the designers and ask them to help me out. But I try to do what I ask people to do.

Did you ever imagine when you were starting out that you would need to know so much about, and become so entrenched in, digital media?

How could I? I don’t know how I got here, actually. It is miraculous. It’s absolutely miraculous. I feel lucky, and I don’t know what happened.

I say this carefully, because it’s not going to sound very humble, but there are not many people who have made the transition. You have a lot of young

people — not even that young, people in their 30s and 40s — who grew up in this world, and they get it. But you don’t have a lot of people who grew up in the world I grew up in who made that transition. And I don’t know how that happened, except I just kept on thinking, I’ll just move from job to job to job to job.

I was listening to Fred Anklam [USA Today’s former senior night editor, who also spoke at the Ole Miss New Media Conference], and I can’t envision 29 years in the same company. There’s nothing wrong with it — I just can’t envision it. In those 29 years, I guess I had 10 jobs. So I think in each one of those jobs, I learned something different.

When I got into this digital space, it was 2000. I left Forbes to go to work for AOL — that was at a time when the digital space was young, they wanted quote “professionals” to bring them a little bit of gravitas. And I was able to use that period of time to learn as much as I may have been able to give.

Today, there is no way that someone could move to digital like I did, because in those ensuing 15 years, there are enough people who gained the gravitas. They don’t need the yesteryear. They just don’t need it.

You don’t seem to be tired of defending a way to the future — you seem genuinely enthusiastic.

I lay it all out there best I can. A lot of my staffers will come to my colleagues who helped start True/ Slant and say, “Why did he give it away [how we do this]?” It’s because I feel compelled to tell the story.

It’s something that comes with age. If you’re in this business for that long, you kind of gain a little bit of been-there-done-that. No one can say about me, “He didn’t actually do this,” or “He didn’t actually do that. He’s just sort of theorizing.” No. It’s all based on direct experience.

I actually used to believe experience didn’t matter that much. Now I see it differently.

It must be a very freeing point to get to.

Oh my God, it’s incredibly freeing. When I first published my first real post — it was four or five months after I got to Forbes — and Tim Forbes, who is a real visionary and invested in the company [True/Slant], said, “Um, I don’t really know about this, Lewis.” Then two or three months later, he said, “You have to keep going. This is the shrewdest thing we’ve ever done. Just tell the story.”

When you tell the story with as many of the warts as you can, the drive-by shootings kind of stop. I’ve always been out there, ahead of it. I kind of get it all out there beforehand, and it takes the steam out of all that stuff.

That’s been the exact opposite approach of, say, NBC News.

Because they’re trying to keep a façade. People truly see through that. The younger generation sees through façades.

The media industry just lost one of its sharpest analysts in David Carr [the New York Times “Media Equation” columnist.] Do you think there’s anyone else to replace his voice?

No. I generally don’t think there’s anyone, period. I keep saying to my colleagues: Who out there could write the definitive New Yorker piece about the media business today? There is no one. There is no one. Who’s out there who could write the “Liar’s Poker” [Michael Lewis’ best-seller about Wall Street in the 1980s] of the media business? I don’t see anybody.

Maybe you should do it.

I’m definitely not smart enough — nor that good of a writer. There just isn’t anybody, because it is so complex and so intricate. The emotions and the grayness of it all — the compromises that come up every day, the complications of technology interacting with content creation, with revenue struggles and with the transitioning to a social world — it is complicated. I wouldn’t even know where to begin to start that kind of story, yet get to the middle of it.

One of the books Michael Lewis wrote that is so germane to what we’re doing is “Moneyball.” I feel like Billy Beane — that notion of the singles, the guys who get on base, versus the guys who they say, “He really looks good in a uniform!” Brian Williams really looks good on TV. But that world doesn’t matter anymore.

But getting back to David Carr — he could be annoying to me. David Carr could have romance where I pooh-poohed the romance. But he could also have nostalgia, and I kind of liked that nostalgia. So he covered the waterfront, and this was from a person who had tremendous vulnerabilities. That’s what made it so good. Plus he also had the imprimatur of the New York Times, which doesn’t hurt. He was a guidepost. And he was very eclectic.

Who or what do you consider to be required reading? What do you get excited to check in with, on any platform, on a regular basis?

Monday mornings used to be the David Carr check, that’s for sure. I wouldn’t call it excitement — I’m not excited — but I would say, checking my Twitter feeds, I feel like I can keep up to date with things. But from a journalistic perspective, there’s not a lot out there. Most of the stuff I read these days is what people send me.

The true answer to that question is that it is very hard for me to do what I do without being incredibly, myopically, focused on stuff, and that doesn’t necessarily include being as general of a reader as I should be.

So what you’re saying is that you don’t have time to binge-watch the final season of The Wire [about the demise of newsroom culture]?

No, I have time to binge-watch television. I binge-watched “House of Cards,” which just jumped the shark, big time. And I love the BBC shows. I guess the whole binge-watching thing for me right now is kind of like my escape.

But I do feel very myopic — I spend more time watching data information than anything else. I get up in the morning, and the first thing I look at is the data. You can get so deep into it, and you say, “Well, why did that happen?” And you get down a little lower, and you ask, “Well, why did that

happen?” and you get down a little lower again. You get into this time warp until you say, “Oh, I get it.” And then you go and do something about it.

The last great article I read was “Towers of Secrecy” in The New York Times. It was a breathtaking series that was incredibly well done and reported, about the Time Warner Center and the real estate purchases. That is great journalism. Now, it was a version of what New York Magazine did a little bit earlier, but the depth of it was breathtaking. That’s something to be in awe of.

I thought about that story a lot, and I went back to my magazine editor and said, “We need to think about this.” Not about doing that exact story. But in so many ways, Forbes should have done something like that. It was about really rich people — really rich people. We’ve been so focused on getting the individual business going, getting the audience going, getting the revenue going — and our magazine does well. But, I said, we need to get back to the big story, and I want to put some money toward that. So here’s some cash. Let’s go figure it out.

So in some ways you’ve come full circle — pushing the boundaries on the business side so you can still afford to do the big stories.

It’s not so much about affording the money. It’s more about affording the time. And we are doing pretty good, so I’m hiring people. I’m hiring a lot of people. We were thinking of making some partnership deals with New York universities — you know, you put in $50,000 and we put in $50,000, and we go do a story. But it has to be something we want to use — don’t go do the story on scams in garbage pickup in New York City. That’s just not going to do the trick.

When you say we’ve come full circle, I feel in some ways I’ve come full circle back to 40 years ago, because I do have great respect for journalism, and I want us to think about that a little more. That New York Times story really did have an impact on me.

It’s been amazing to see the New York Times’ willingness to take so many risks, to do so much front-and-center experimenting.

I think they are struggling. There are no guarantees of a future for the New York Times. I’m not suggesting anything is imminent, but who knows?

I’m telling you, in the next 18 months, there’s going to be a big blowout. Somebody is going down. It has to happen. There’s going to be that shocker — the “Oh my God , that’s over?” It will happen. Some people are just hanging on. And you can only do that for so long.

The author is an assistant professor of journalism in the Meek School.